Tuberville: Defensive line will attack

Don Williams

Wednesday

Feb 24, 2010 at 2:29 PM

If a football coach at any level wants to win a championship, Tommy Tuberville says he can start by getting the most out of his defensive linemen.

That's what Tuberville told a roomful of mostly high school coaches during a weekend West Texas Football Clinic session in Lubbock. That's something he plans to do at Texas Tech, just like at every stop he's made the last two decades.

"The one thing you have to have to be successful and to win championships is you have to play good defensive line," the new Tech coach said. "That doesn't mean you have to have great players."

Not surprisingly, then, the Red Raiders' new coach also has strong convictions about how to prepare and deploy his defensive ends and tackles. Next season, he plans to have the Tech D-linemen keying off the snap of the football - not the offensive line movement - attacking the line of scrimmage while aiming for penetration two or three feet beyond and running hard to the ball.

"If it's third down and 15 or third and 1, our defensive line is going to play the same technique," he said. "We're going to be attacking the line of scrimmage, getting depth, making plays."

Nothing that sounds too radical - former Tech defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeill also preached an attacking style - but Tuberville said it was not exactly conventional wisdom when Jimmy Johnson took that approach to the University of Miami, and then the Dallas Cowboys, in the mid-to-late 1980s. Fronts that read and moved down the line of scrimmage were more the norm.

With that as a foundation, Tuberville has adopted and adhered to many principles since. Some might seem subtle from the stands, but Tuberville stressed them to his coaching audience as vitally important:

Such as:

 Defensive linemen will take their key from first movement of the football.

"The biggest key when you're playing defensive line, that I've found over the years, is so many people look at the guy in front (of them)," Tuberville said. "If you talk to any really good defensive lineman who has been around it for a while, the first thing that they will key is the football. They want to move when the ball moves, not when the offensive lineman moves. I think that's the biggest key to defensive line play is, when that ball moves, you're gone."

 If that means not being square to the line of scrimmage before the snap, so be it. Tuberville said defensive linemen who square their shoulders to the line pre-snap seldom key the snap of the football.

"Most of the time when you play a team that keys the football, you will see a tilt, a little bit of a tilt to the shoulders of the defensive linemen," Tuberville said. "We tell our defensive linemen to get to a position where they can see the ball.

"If they're turned, a noticeable turn, that's fine. But you get to where you can see that ball move, because we don't want you moving when (the offensive lineman) moves. They have the advantage when that happens."

 Many defensive linemen are coached to keep their shoulders square to the line of scrimmage, in part to defend bootleg action. Tuberville said he doesn't worry about giving up the occasional bootleg.

"We want our defensive ends and defensive tackles to be flying to the football," he said. "It goes back to one thing: Don't worry about size. Worry about (having) guys that can run. Your defensive linemen will make more plays by doing this when the ball goes away than when the ball comes to them. If it goes away, these guys will have a great opportunity to make a play, because they are hauling butt down the line of scrimmage.

"One thing we always tell our defensive linemen: We're forcing the ball, but we're not worried about linebackers being free and trying to keep blockers off of linebackers. We want them to make the play first."

 Tuberville's defensive linemen will use an elongated stance and line up as tightly as possible to the line of scrimmage - not one foot or two feet off. Behind them, it's a different story.

"If you play an attacking-style front defense, you have to play your linebackers deep," he said. "I think that might be the biggest mistake people make is if you're an attacking front that you play (linebackers) 2 to 3 yards off the ball and then, really, they have no chance."

What Tuberville's defenses do is deploy the linebackers with their heels 5 yards off the ball. Then they don't step laterally unless the ball goes laterally, such as on a toss sweep.

"Our first step is always downhill with the play-side foot," he said. "After that, we don't coach them. We just tell them, 'Run to the football.' The one thing you don't want to do if you're playing an attacking front is over-coach a linebacker.

"If you're going to coach anybody, coach those D-linemen. Coach them to key the ball and get their butt upfield on the snap of the ball."

Tuberville has said about half of Tech's defensive package will be based out of a 3-4 and half will be based on 4-3. Either way, he said, the techniques won't change. Tech's front men will play gaps, not head-up on blockers - much like they've done in the past.

Though many 3-4 proponents prefer a massive noseguard and bigger defensive ends and inside linebackers, Tuberville says he doesn't obsess over height and weight specifications.

"You don't have to have the prototype big guys if you play a Jimmy Johnson-style defensive front or, really, the defensive front that we're going to play here," he said.

TEXAS TECH/New coach tells football clinic that strong

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